It’s Time to Defund Fox News
If business types really care about social justice, they’ll defund the country’s most prominent purveyor of anti-justice poison. And here’s an unlikely model for them to follow.
But there is an essential transformation the C-suite could set in motion immediately: Defund the toxic political culture, or at least its most conspicuous instrument, that makes progress difficult if not impossible and turns
second thoughts about a mammy-esque syrup bottle into “they murdered Mrs. Butterworth,” as a recent
guest on Fox News fumed.
Today’s newly woke business leaders are also positioned to do something transformative, swift, and unilateral, if they focus on a single variable: the political propellent crucial to the election of our first white-only president. Fox News weaponized a minority constituency to gain majority power and has also helped render Trump unaccountable by maintaining an aroused and
misinformed base to body-check irresolute congressional Republicans.
For America’s brands, de-sponsoring Fox News may have become the smart as well as right thing to do. Here, Birmingham offers a template for risk minimization. Two years before King came to town, the Chamber of Commerce had decided it had to address the city’s race problem following a Ku Klux Klan attack against the Freedom Riders, orchestrated by Bull Connor.
Like the Senior Citizens, Fox’s corporate sponsors should act
en bloc with Spartacus-like anonymity and withdraw advertising with no explanation (“our priorities have changed”) and under no threat of a boycott, other than the implied buying power of the people out on the streets. The ad hoc cancelations they typically make—such as those
currently hitting Tucker Carlson—
do not necessarily dent the network’s revenues and may now smack of
“performative allyship.” As the Klan and the civil rights movement were lumped together in the white Southern mind as “extremists on both sides,” false equivalencies will be drawn between Fox and MSNBC. But
unconstructive as the left’s ministry of truth may be, it has not taken over a cable news channel or a political party or the White House.
It’s Time to Defund Fox News